Mobile gaming - everything to play forWritten by Christopher Smith
Chances are that you or someone you know is affected by mobile gaming virus. There is a lot of it about and developments in technology are helping it to spread like wildfire. Even if you do not consider yourself a gamer you could one day be exposed to its effects. All it takes is a Java-enabled mobile phone and there are already over 150 million of them in US alone. What we are really talking about of course is growth in popularity of mobile gaming; in other words, playing games on your mobile phone. Mobile gaming is set to become big business in 2004 as number of BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) and Java-enabled mobile phones in circulation continues to grow. In addition, manufacturers are continually adding colored screens and advanced features to their latest models, making mobile gaming a rich and vibrant experience for users. The games themselves are readily available from a wide range of sources and can be easily downloaded from numerous web sites, with prices starting at $2.99 or less. There is something for everyone with games ranging from favorites such as PacMan, chess and checkers to motor racing, jet-skiing and even erotic games. Many people consider online gaming to be a predominantly male activity and a young male activity at that. Last fall, at a conference on mobile gaming, Mark Stanger from game developers Eidos suggested that 92% of PlayStation 2 players are men. Whilst it is probably true that online and console gamers are mainly male (how many women do you know that own a Sony PlayStation 2) analysis suggests that mobile phone gaming could be encouraging a growing percentage of women to play games.
| | Buffer Under-run Protection & Its Value in DuplicationWritten by John McGrath
What is it? It is known by many names, "BURN-Proof", "SafeBurn", and "lossless linking" to name but a few. Regardless of name, they are all buffer under-run prevention strategies. In dark days of CD-R recording, before we had BURN-Proof and like, if a drive's on-board buffer became empty, write would fail leaving an incomplete and unusable disc. The on-board buffer of drive is analogous to fuel tank on a military aircraft, which relies on periodic in-flight refuelings. If jet's fuel runs out, plane will crash. The host computer, or duplication controller, is refueling aircraft. If it cannot supply DATA as fast as drive consumes it, write process will fail. Essentially, what buffer under-run prevention gives you is a means to pause while host catches up. Why do I need it for my PC? Buffer under-run prevention was really a response from drive manufacturers to overcome limiting factors that were preventing drives from going to higher write speeds. Many PCs were, and still are, simply not up to task of writing at these higher speeds. The burden of handling so many technical support calls was more than anyone was willing to deal with. The answer was simply to design drives in a way whereby if computer could not deliver data as fast as CD-R drive required, it would simply pause and wait for PC to catch up. No coasters, no tech calls. Why does it not make sense on a high performance duplication system? A
|